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Thomas Beddoes: Poetry, Medicine, Disease and Drugs in the Early Nineteenth Century: a Symposium

A series of lectures including refreshments and buffet lunch “O! Excellent Air Bag”: Thomas Beddoes and the Pneumatic Institution by Mike Jay This paper tells the story of Erasmus Darwin’s protégé Thomas Beddoes and his experiments with medical gases at the Pneumatic Institution in Bristol, in which he collaborated with a remarkable circle of scientists and poets that included Humphry Davy, James Watt, Samuel Taylor Coleridge and Robert Southey. Mike Jay is an author and historian who has written widely on the history of science, medicine and culture, and contributes regularly to the London Review of Books, among other publications. His books include Free Radicals: How a Group of Romantic Experimenters Gave Birth to Psychedelic Science. Beddoes and the Romantic Poets’ by Tim Fulford As well as being a pioneering medical researcher and geologist, Beddoes was a poet. My paper looks at his interactions with Erasmus Darwin, Coleridge, Southey and Wordsworth – at the radical poetic experiment he made when he encountered Darwin’s Botanic Garden and at the parody he published of Wordsworth’s simplistic Lyrical Ballads – which gave great offence. Beddoes also treated the poets’ ailments – physical and mental – and used his contacts to get them work for the newspapers.